


Long Night's Journey Into Day

by LaVieEnRose



Series: The One Where Justin Loses His Hearing [30]
Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Deaf Character, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 18:41:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15540567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaVieEnRose/pseuds/LaVieEnRose
Summary: --Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?--No. Saints and poets, maybe...they do some.Brian's in Australia, and Justin isn't answering his phone.





	Long Night's Journey Into Day

**Author's Note:**

> The events of The One Where Brian Isn't There, from Brian's point of view. The One Where Brian IS There?

My third night in Australia, I looked at the clock on the nightstand, and the trick working his hardest between my legs. I counted in my head—almost ten AM in New York—weighed the quality of the head I was getting—mediocre—cursed, and shook his shoulder. “Hey.”

He looked up.

“Sorry,” I said, more to my cock than to him. “You gotta go.”

“Are you joking?” he said.

“No.” I maneuvered out from under him and tossed him my wallet from the nightstand. “Take some cab money if you want it.”

He threw it back and stood up, throwing on his clothes. “I don't want your money, asshole.” It's hard to sound too mad with that accent, though. 

“Works for me. Bye now.” 

He glared at me on his way out, the door sliding anticlimactically shut behind him. I pulled the sheet around my waist, lit a cigarette, and called Justin.

He was walking briskly outside, panting a little—because he was fucking sick, but we didn't know that at the time. “G'day, mate,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. **Was that supposed to be an Australian accent?**

“Yeah.”

**You might be too Deaf for that at this point.**

**That's your opinion,** he said, then immediately twisted to his elbow to sneeze three times.

 **Jesus, still?** I said. He'd been in the middle of a shitty allergy attack last time I called, when it was night in New York and afternoon here. He'd been pitiful as fuck in bed with a box of tissues, and I'd ducked into the bathroom of the conference center and helped him figure out an additional use for them. 

Now of course in retrospect we know he'd already blossomed into lovely a sinus infection at this point, but you know what they say about hindsight and shit.

 **All fucking night.** He rubbed his eyes.

 **So you decided to go for a stroll outside.** I said.

**I didn't walk thirty blocks today, are you kidding? I just got off the subway. You've got good timing.**

I shifted under the sheet. **Tell me about it.**

He laughed. **I can't get you off right now, I'm like two blocks from the gallery.** He sniffled and rubbed furiously at his nose.

 **You look cute,** I said. **Like a little animal.** I am fucking _garbage_ for Justin when his allergies are messing with him, it's goddamn embarrassing. Just tie me up in a bag, leave me on the curb and let me stink in the sun garbage. He always looks younger, and also sort of like he's been crying, and I haven't yet figured out how to not have feelings about those things.

God, I'd kicked out a trick in the middle of a blow job to talk to a snotty kid who didn't have time for phone sex and I wasn't even pissed about it. Leave me on the curb, I'm telling you. 

**I'm miserable,** he said, and then coughed into his wrist to prove it (or because he was _fucking sick_ , but I won't beat the horse). **How was the conference today?**

I stretched. **Good. Saw some guy showing off this new image-editing software that looked really cool.**

 **Oh yeah?** I knew that would get him.

 **Amazing how far we've come from your little computer,** I said, and he smiled.

When he brought his hand up to rub his eyes again, his fingers were twitching some. “How are the men?” he said, out loud.

**Gorgeous. Hand giving you problems?**

“Oh. Yeah, just acting up. I didn't sleep great.” He stopped. “Here now. I gotta go.”

I yawned. **Okay. Have a good day. Give Marie a nice wet kiss from me.**

**Always. Love you.**

**Mmmhmm,** I fingerspelled, and he laughed.

**

Four more days in Australia. Maybe by the end of it I'd finally adjust to the time difference. Just in time to head home. 

Justin, it turned out, had always wanted to go to Australia, would have loved to come, was dying to come, but he had work and big problems with vertigo on planes, so it obviously wasn't an option. I wasn't exactly worried about leaving him alone for a week—in terms of mental health, he'd been stable for about a month now, and we were finally starting to catch our breath—but I didn't really like it. Daphne was going to be out of town for most of it, and he wasn't very close yet with Derek and Emily or the other friends he'd make in the city, so...I really was leaving him very alone.

I said maybe he should get someone to come stay with him, have his mom come up for the week or something, and he'd laughed, rolled his eyes, insisted he'd be fine. His antidepressants were working, our building had a doorman, he was an adult, stop _scowling at me, Brian_. His neurologist had lowered his anticonvulsant the week before, which I already hadn't been in love with, but Justin said the higher dosages made him feel slow and dull and he wanted to try it and it would be fine, and no, we didn't need to wait until I'd be home to keep an eye on him, because it's not like I was going to be with him every moment of every day even if I was in New York, so it didn't matter, so _stop scowling at me._

Justin had just gotten home from work when I was up the next morning, feeling like I'd just fucking fallen asleep even though I'd actually been goddamn comatose for eight hours. **Getting too old for this shit.** I told Justin. 

We were mirrors of each other, me getting into my suit, Justin sitting on the bed and pulling off his shoes. **I know the feeling,** he said. He looked wiped out as hell.

**How was work?**

**We didn't get that artist we wanted, the one from London.**

**Oh, um...Mara someone.**

**Right. She's going with a gallery uptown.**

**Damn.**

He sneezed, hard, then again, and dropped his head into his hands.

 **You've got to be getting sick of that,** I said.

 **Yeah. I just took a ton of Benadryl. I'm going to sleep for a million hours.** His eyes were glazed over by then, which I attributed to his allergies instead of the fever we didn't realize he had.

But still, I remember I paused as I was sliding the knot on my tie up to my throat. **You know, you really don't look good.**

He pawed at his nose. **Thanks.** He pulled on his PIFA shirt, this soft ratty thing he wears when he's not feeling well.

**Yeah, anytime.**

**I'll feel better after I get some sleep,** he said. **I was up most of the night dealing with this shit.**

**Get some rest.**

He yawned and nodded. **I'll text you in the morning.**

**If you must.**

It was strange, being in this kind of constant communication with him. Our only real extended separation at that point was when he was in LA working on the Rage movie, and while he was there we'd text a few times during the day but usually only got on the phone once a week, if that. Beyond that, if I'd had to go to New York or Chicago for the weekend, back when we lived in Pittsburgh, we'd usually go the whole stretch without talking.

Losing his hearing changed that. As we fell more into sign language over English, it meant Justin preferred video calls, where he could sign, to texts, and...well, I found I didn't exactly mind seeing him.

I guess we'd figured out a balance after all these years. I'd figured out I didn't hate doing the coupley shit nearly as much as I hated having fucking conversations about doing it, and Justin...I guess realized he didn't need to talk about much as long as I just acted like a fucking reasonable human a good eighty-percent of the time, which is about all I'm capable of offering. He and I have always had a knack for falling into things, it seems, so maybe we'd both decided to use that to our advantage instead of fighting the current, for me, or trying to nail down exactly what that current is, if you're him.

Things were good, that's what I'm trying to tell you. We'd gotten through Justin's mental health crisis, he hadn't poured boiling water on himself yet...shit was good right then. What happened next didn't really change that. Even though, as you know, Justin wouldn't be texting me in the morning.

**

Well, I guess he did technically, if you consider 1 AM his time to be morning.

I was in a meeting about, of all things, accessible advertising, biting my tongue and mentally apologizing to Justin every time the presenter used the term “hearing-impaired,” and I didn't see the text for almost an hour.

“What the fuck?” I mumbled to myself when I saw a had a text from him, counting hours in my head. Honestly I assumed it was a dirty picture or some shit. Justin gets messy as fuck on Benadryl.

But it was not, as you know, it was:

_Hey I know you're in a meeting but I have that falling feeling don't freak out I just want to sleep_

_what the fuck are you talking about?_ I texted back, before I even gave myself time to think about what that meant.

And then I stood there waiting for an answer in the hallway of the fucking conference center, staring at that text, putting together in my head that, yes, he had definitely mentioned before that he gets “that falling feeling” before he has one of his larger seizures, which at that point were not tonic clonic seizures, were not anything where he lost consciousness, and why the fuck was he having one his larger seizures, no, he was having a fucking allergy attack, not a fucking _seizure,_ and he was _fine._

I called him, and when he didn't answer that call, or the next, I texted him, _answer your fucking phone, justin._

I called again and growled, “See, this is the problem with you being Deaf,” and got a very dirty look from someone walking by who'd just sat through the spiel on accessibility.

I called again. Texted again. 

_sunshine i swear to god_

_answer your motherfucking phone_

_justin come on_

I stepped outside, lit a cigarette, called Kinnetik Pittsburgh's cab company and gave them Michael's address, and was already listening to the ringback on Michael's phone when I remembered the time difference.

Whatever.

“Get up and go to New York,” I said.

Michael got in the cab, I texted Justin _if you're not already dead i'm gonna kill you. michael's on his way_ and then I...fucking went to my next seminar, because what the hell else was I going to do? It was an hour session, so I was out in time for Michael to land in New York, and I spent the whole thing with my phone on my lap in case Justin called. He didn't, as you know, and by the time it was over I was starting to come out of my skin just a little bit, maybe. I went back to the hotel and started packing, just...to be packed. 

Half an hour since Michael called from the cab. He had to be there by now. Which meant he hadn't called the second he walked in the door of the apartment, which was probably good news, because it meant he was dealing with Justin, which meant Justin was alive. 

The real concern here, in case you haven't followed the saga too closely, was that Justin was upright when he had the seizure, fell, and now had a head injury. Someday I'm going to just put a fucking helmet on that kid so I can actually goddamn calm down once in a while, because every time the clumsy fucker hits his head on the top of a cabinet or gets up on a ladder at work I'm a goddamn mess thinking of the scans his doctor showed us once of people who've had multiple head traumas. It's not pretty shit. Somehow, we've managed to avoid any kind of seizure-related head injury, except for that one time that I'm sure we'll get to at some point, but that's a ways down the line.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about as I paced around the hotel room, except for the part of me that wasn't, and that was the part of me that was making me really...uncomfortable. Because there was a part of me that wasn't panicking and was just fucking...I don't even know the word for it. Is there a word for it? Part of me kept thinking about him alone and sick in the apartment, even if he was really, on an emergency level, fine, and I kept...seeing him, in my head, thinking of shit he'd be feeling too shitty to do for himself, shit he maybe wouldn't ask Michael for. 

I don't know. Maybe there's not a word for it.

Finally my phone rang, and Michael said, “Yeah, I think you want to come back,” and I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes and tried to breathe.

He was okay. Michael said he was asleep again already, and offered to wake him up, and it was tempting as fuck, but I said no. Really I just wanted Michael to turn the fucking video on and just like...point me at him, send me a picture of him, something, let me _see_ him, but Michael's a dramatic motherfucker and I knew I needed to stay calm or he'd get all panicky and freak out Justin. So I didn't ask for that. I gave him some instructions, found a flight online, found Justin's boss's business card in a pocket of my briefcase and texted her that he wasn't coming in for a few days, texted Cynthia and told her to send whatever apologies she needed to the conference organizers for my sudden departure, and then called the front desk and checked out of my room and worked on getting the fuck out of the Southern Hemisphere.

**

It was daytime in New York by the time I got to the airport, so Cynthia called me just as I walked in the front doors.

“What the fuck do you mean, you're leaving?” she said. “I told you it was going to be boring. You said you were prepared for boring.”

“I have to get home,” I said.

There must have been something in my voice, because she paused and said, “What's wrong with Justin?” She'd been seeing more of him the past few months before he got his job, because he was depressed and alone all day and I was freaked out about him being depressed and alone all day so a lot of times I'd drag him to the office with me just to...have him underfoot, I don't know. She'd been working on her signing so she could have a simple conversation with him, and maybe that was enough for her to be able to tell that something had been off with him. Christ, she probably thought I was running home because Justin had slit his wrists in the bathtub. 

“He's sick,” I said. Any other words caught in my throat. At that point, I was starting to develop a weird habit that's stuck with me to this day, something I haven't really been able to fully explain, even to Justin, which is that I really, really hate talking about him in English. To the extent that, if it were up to me, people who don't sign wouldn't even know he exists. Maybe it's just to compensate for the fact that apparently I can't goddamn shut up when I'm signing, or maybe it's because I don't like having conversations about Justin, even when he's not there, that he couldn't theoretically understand. Maybe I'm annoyed with hearing people thinking they get to know things about Justin—you know, that deeply personal stuff like his name and his job and other things people generally ask me that I get all pissy about—when they don't even bother to learn a few signs.

Who knows. But whatever the reason, I hated doing it, and I already had to keep powering through it to do it to Michael because hell if I was going to have him kill the kid because some information got lost in translation thanks to Michael's less than stellar signing, so Cynthia was getting the dregs.

“So I just...need to get home,” I finished.

“Do you want me to go the apartment?” Cynthia asked.

“No, Michael's there.”

She laughed a little. “Michael and Justin alone together?”

“They're okay nowadays.”

She was still laughing. “Justin's going to eat him alive.”

And then, suddenly, I laughed too.

**

I got to talk to Justin after I went through security.

It was a funny moment, actually, because Michael pointed the phone at him, and he looked like absolute shit, completely worn out, but the weird thing was that my first thought when I saw him wasn't worry or sadness or anything like that. Those came pretty quickly, but my immediate thought was just this kind of...hey, look, it's Justin. I was just happy to see him. It's stupid.

He was talking really slow, slurring his words and generally just having a hard time keeping up. I signed slowly for him, and he seemed to get most of it, though he was forgetting stuff a couple minutes after I said it. The main impression I got from that conversation was that he was definitely going to have another seizure. I don't really know how I can tell, because it's not as if I see all of Justin's seizures coming, but sometimes I can, and right there it was so obvious I almost forgot to tell Michael.

“I think he has a fever,” Michael said, after he'd fallen asleep, and God, that tracked, because he's always had issues with his epilepsy when he has a fever, even back when all he had were those small ones, his hand would _always_ give him shit when he was sick, and he is the worst, the goddamn worst, at knowing when he has fever. I used to think he was trying to hide it from me and I'd get all pissy with him, but no, he just genuinely has no clue. The kid's useless. 

But I should have been able to tell when he got home from work the night before. When he was sitting on the bed pulling off his shoes like they weighed fifty goddamn pounds, I should have been able to look at him and know. Damn it.

I said goodbye to Michael and went off the grid when my partner was sick for fourteen goddamn hours.

**

I'd read through all the shitty inflight magazines, finished the legal mystery novel I'd grabbed at the newsstand and already couldn't remember a word of, done four laps up and down the aisle, and I was still fucking here.

I checked my watch. **Eight hours,** I signed to myself. I do that sometimes. **Eight hours, twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five.**

The man across the aisle waved his hand at me in that special way Deaf people do to get attention. He was business-casual, decently attractive for a guy in his mid-to-late forties, wedding ring. I saw the wave out of the corner of my eye and looked over without even thinking about it. Justin's trained me well.

He nodded at my hands. **Nervous flier?** It took me a second to switch my brain from English to ASL, so I probably sat there gaping like an idiot for a couple seconds. He smiled indulgently.

 **Uh, not really,** I said eventually. **Just anxious to get back.** He must have been an American; Australia has its own sign language, and I didn't know any of it but knew it was close to British Sign Language, which, strangely, has absolutely nothing to do with American.

**Traveling for business, I assume?**

I nodded. **And you?**

 **Visiting my son,** he said. **He's studying abroad there this semester.**

 **Must be nice,** I said.

He looked thoughtful. **He's enjoying it. I worry. He has MS, and it's awfully far from home.**

So it was that, and it was the sign language, and it was the fourteen hour flight, but I said, **My partner has epilepsy.** Just blurted it right the fuck out.

He acted like this was a normal conversational segue. **How's he doing?**

I'm always telling people that Justin's fine. That he's doing great. That they should stop goddamn hovering over him and treating him like a child.

And it's like I told you, right? We were past the mental health crisis. He had his job. He hadn't poured boiling water on himself. Everything was fucking hunky dory, that's what I said, right? 

But look, this fucker didn't know Justin, and hell, I was never going to see him again.

 **Not so great,** I said. I cleared my throat. **How about your son?**

 **Not so great,** he said, and I turned around in my seat and faced him.

**

What's funny is, after I'd been talking to this guy for a goddamn hour, the flight attendant walked by and he stopped her and asked her if she had an updated arrival time. Asked her out loud. The guy wasn't Deaf. I never found out why he knew sign language; I imagine his son must have been Deaf, or his wife, or maybe both. But we were just two hearing sons of bitches sitting in a middle of a plane having a conversation in sign language.

I never told him I wasn't Deaf. I don't know. And Jesus Christ, I was telling this fucker everything, the whole goddamn saga, just unloading the fucking history of me and Justin, on this guy, but, you know, conveniently leaving out the parts about him losing his hearing as adult and me very much not losing my hearing as adult because...I don't know, I thought if he knew we'd probably switch to talking out loud, and I just didn't want to speak. It wasn't about people overhearing, not really, it was just...all this shit was going on with Justin at home, he was sick and I had no idea what was going on and I hadn't been able to sign about it to anyone but fucking zonked out Justin himself, and getting to do it was like finally goddamn breathing. I couldn't switch to English right then. I couldn't.

 **Being sick freaks him out, I think,** I said. **He's...I mean, I guess now it's okay, by now he would have figured it out anyway, but he got this awareness of his mortality a lot younger than he was supposed to. He didn't really get much time to walk around thinking he was invincible. They beat that out of him. So to speak.**

 **Without people like that, there'd be no saints and poets,** the guy—oh, Mark, his name was Mark—said.

 **I'd rather he weren't a saint or a poet,** I said. **He can just be happy and stupid.**

 **Yeah, the world could use more of that, too,** he said. He paused. **But also more saints and poets.**

 **I don't give a shit about what the world needs,** I said.

 **Yeah, me neither,** he said. **But sometimes I have to tell myself there's some reason for this shit. Look for some silver lining.**

 **Got to imagine it wasn't real fun to be related to one of those saints,** I said.

 **Probably not.** He smiled. **But you sure do get a great story out of it.**

 **He's not a story,** I said. **He's just a boy.**

**

I called from my layover in LA. Michael said that, sure enough, he'd had another seizure, so at this point I knew there was probably no getting out of a hospital visit once I got back. Two fairly major seizures in that amount of time meant he needed to get dosed up with the kind of anticonvulsants that just shut him down and have his brain reset. But I couldn't tell Michael that, because the last thing I wanted to subject Justin to right now was a hospital visit with Michael's un-fluent ass. He gets nervous enough in hospitals as it is, with his drug allergies. He wasn't doing that without me.

God, I really should have listened to Mark and slept on that goddamn plane ride. 

This time when Michael asked if I wanted him to wake up Justin, I was physically fucking unable to say no. He was still groggy as hell, and he looked so fucking pale and horrendous that I actually cracked and asked him if he wanted Michael to take him to the hospital, because I was half-sure he was gonna fucking drop dead before I got out of California.

It must have shown in my face, because even through his damn delirium Justin picked up on it and started trying to insist to me that he's okay, which always fucking annoys the crap out of me. 

So then he gave up and lay back on the pillows and he just looked, I don't know, sleepy and feverish and soft, and I was so goddamn tired, and I don't think I've been jealous of Michael Charles Novotny since we were kids but fuck, right at that moment did I goddamn hate him for getting to lie in bed next to that while I was stuck in some fucking non-ergonomic terminal chair at LAX. Say what you want about having a chronically ill partner—or, you know, don't—but they cannot be beat for company when you just want to take a fucking nap.

I told him to drink some water and slept in uncomfortable, ten minute spurts the whole flight to New York.

**

Michael met me at the door to the apartment, and I didn't see Justin right away. In a strange turn of events, I was okay with that. It gave me a minute to get my bearings, to take a deep breath and get my game face on.

The game face that it turned out, I didn't even fucking use, because instead of putting on some brave act for Justin I just saw him sitting there on the couch and I was just...so goddamn relieved. It overwhelmed everything, just from fucking seeing him.

I breathed out and said, “Hey,” and he mouthed it back to me, maybe thinking I didn't say it out loud either, which was just...well. This is already sappy enough, so I won't say what it was.

I knelt down in front of him and he leaned his forehead into mine, and he was so hot and sweaty and shivery and here. And all of a sudden it was kind of...hilarious, how sick he was? I don't really know how to explain it. I know Michael thought we were fucking crazy, because we both kind of started laughing together, but the whole situation was just ridiculous. I left him for four days and he managed to get this sick? Who the fuck does that? And now I was here, and it was going to be fine, and he was just such a goddamn mess. Who's even this much of a mess? What is this shit? There's something kind of beautiful about the way Justin can so completely fall apart and still stay so, entirely, unmistakably himself, and if you think that's not something rare and important then why the fuck are you even here.

Who breaks and comes back together like this, over and over? Who even does it once?

And looks so fucking good doing it, Christ.

He said we should sleep before we went to the hospital, which was hard to resist when he was in front of me all sleepy and warm and smelling like him, so I picked him up and brought him to bed. I probably said thank you to Mikey before I sent him off to the pull-out couch, but who the fuck knows.

I got out of the suit I'd been wearing for thirty-six hours at that point and crawled into bed next to Justin. We didn't talk much for a little while, because he just fit so fucking well into my arms, and it's hard to sign like that. Eventually he pulled back enough to see me, blinking slowly while he watched me.

 **Did you miss me?** he said.

**Nah.**

He smiled.

 **You know, if you wanted me to come home, you could have asked,** I said. **You didn't have to do this whole situation.**

 **I told you I was jealous you got to go to Australia,** he said. **I had to find some way to spectacularly ruin it.**

 **This is way better than Australia,** I said.

**Sucker.**

**I know.**

I couldn't stop touching him. His shirt was just so soft, and his skin so hot underneath, and his hair fluffy and in his eyes and...God. There was nothing else.

 **Are you okay?** I asked him. I couldn't help it.

“I'm okay,” he whispered. His hand was starting to twitch again, so I held it between mine.

Tomorrow was going to suck, I knew. We both hate hospitals, we were both exhausted as hell. Tomorrow was going to suck. But first we were going to get some fucking sleep, and Justin was going to be here.

My fucking saint and poet.


End file.
